Wednesday, May 26, 2010

World's Greatest Podcast: Hoarding & Pat Quinn's sleeping habits

The conversation hit on really just two topics today when Mary, John Williams and I had our weekly chat on WGN AM 720. First was the issue of how important it is for Gov. Pat Quinn to stay in the governor's mansion. Next was Mary's front-page column this morning, Hoarding is not
entertaining:

My question relating to the news story -- "Couple rescued from mound of belongings in home," has to do with when hoarding starts. At some point, you have to figure, there is that one, turning point decision not to throw something away that by all rights ought to be thrown away, then the barriers are down.

Another thought or question -- how much of what even healthy, normal people keep around their homes and in their storage sheds is in any meaningful sense vital, useful or precious?

A very alert Nancy Nall suggested I find this story in the Tribune archives, which I did:

September 15, 1996-- BEHIND CLOSED DOORS; A SCHAUMBURG FAMILY REBUILDS AFTER A SHATTERING DESCENT INTO CHAOS

By Bonita Brodt, a Tribune staff writer.

At 4:30 that morning, Kelly Mahnke sat alone in her living room, cross-legged and all hunched over. Her face was puffy after hours of hysterical tears. She was calmer, now. Talking on the phone.

Listening, mostly.

Then her head snapped up. She couldn't believe it. Someone was at the door.

"Who could that be?" she whispered into the receiver.

"Oh, Kelly. It's probably the police. I was so worried I called 911."

Still a little drunk, Kelly regarded the door dumbly.

"My God," she mumbled when it finally hit her. "You did what?"

Slowly, Kelly put the phone down. At that moment, words seemed of little use. It would have been impossible to explain the inevitability of what was about to happen, for even her best friend did not know how they were living.

No one did.

The doorbell kept ringing. Heart racing, Kelly got to her feet. She wasn't wearing much, just a cream-colored underthing, but that wasn't on her mind just then. She stepped carefully and when she got to the door, she opened it just enough to slide her slender body through. Kelly had often wondered if the nightmare had an ending. She was scared.

Yes, she told the officer, she had argued with her husband and, yes, she had swallowed pills. But she said she was feeling better and her friend had overreacted and her husband and three children were upstairs sleeping.

"Hey! Wait a minute. No! You can't go in there. No. No! It's a mess!"

"She started grabbing at me," recalled Gerard Thommes, a patrolman for the Village of Schaumburg. "She was telling me I couldn't go in there and I said I had to. I had to make sure everyone was all right."

Kelly lunged and tried to block him. But by that time, paramedics were coming up the sidewalk, and faces appeared in neighbors' windows, watching curiously as she was moved out of the way. With all his might, Thommes pushed, but it felt as if the door was hitting something. His first thought was that the husband might be lying behind it, dead.

Eventually, he was able to force the opening wide enough. But for the longest time, he just stood there, eyes following the beam of his flashlight as it danced over a mighty sea of garbage and debris.

He distinctly heard flies.

He was wondering about rats when he heard a voice. It was his and he was muttering: "What the hell?"

Until that moment, there was no "before" or "after" for the Mahnke family. Their lives were divided into two incongruous worlds.

In one, visible from the outside, the couple owned a modest townhome in a comfortable white-bread suburb. The father went to work; the mother stayed home. They did things like take their three kids fishing. Went to church sometimes. But kept to themselves, mostly.

In the other world, known only on the inside, life had totally broken down.

Fragments of toys jutted up from a thick carpeting of trash that buried the floor two-feet-under. Whole pieces of furniture had been camouflaged with debris. There were mountains of soiled clothing. Decaying leftovers still on plates. Piles of beer cans and liquor bottles in every room.

Though they didn't know it then, Roger and Kelly Mahnke were alcoholics. They drank to have fun, to avoid, to escape, to medicate.

Then drinking took from them without asking. Or maybe they just let go.

It hadn't always been like this. Custom portraits of the children-Meghan, 10, Matt, 8, and Brendan, 3-were displayed proudly on walls covered with grass cloth. A carved wooden heart that said, "Mom's kitchen" hung from a nail. But as life disintegrated, pages of family photo albums got ripped out, stepped on and matted with last night's fast food. It was a bewildering paradox even to the people who lived here. One day Kelly remembers looking around the living room and asking Roger: "What would we do if Ed McMahon came to our house with the check for a million dollars? We couldn't open the door."

Life does not afford any of us the luxury of knowing what waits around the corner. Nor do we know how we will deal with circumstance when it arrives. We may not see it coming, and we may not understand as it is happening.

We don't really know what we are capable of until we are there.

On May 5, 1995, the Mahnkes lost everything that mattered.Their self- respect. Their privacy. Their kids.

But they have surprised a lot of people in the 16 months since. A needlepoint plaque that says, "Nobody's perfect" is displayed in their living room window, facing out. They have thought a lot about what might have happened if not for the defining episode that blew up their lives.

Roger: "I would have been the same, probably."

Kelly: "I would have been dead."

Roger and Kelly married young, but they did not have a wedding. They drove to Wisconsin one day in 1982 and made it official in front of a judge. Both grew up in the same working-class neighborhood on the Northwest Side of Chicago. They dated for three months and became inseparable, feeling stronger together than they did apart.

Kelly was 18, a high school senior and working a waitress job that she hated so she could afford the $25 a week rent to live in a friend's basement. Roger was seven years older, a neighborhood longhair who played bass guitar in a garage band. He had gone from community college to steady work as a skilled laborer in heating and cooling repairs. On her key ring, Kelly still keeps the plastic-handled key from their first night in a motel.

Their first grocery receipt as a married couple is tucked inside a worn red wallet in which Kelly keeps sentimental things. She also saved a folded-up piece of lined notebook paper. On one side is a heart that says, "Kelly L's Roger." On the other side, she wrote, "Mr. & Mrs. Mahnke," then twice practiced a note she imagined someday writing to a teacher. It asked that her daughter be excused from having missed school on Tuesday because she had a sore throat.

Those were elements of normal life Kelly hoped for but that she and Roger never quite managed. Their picture had problems with its composition, cluttered with props that didn't belong or detracted or just plain overwhelmed.

By the time she met Roger, Kelly already had taken the initiative to distance herself from a troubled relationship with her father. Her childhood memories include punishments for not cleaning the house well enough. Though her father acknowledges Kelly could be difficult and was disciplined, he denies any of the physical abuse she says she remembers, such as being pulled down a flight of stairs by her hair. Her parents were divorced and both remarried, her mother to a man she met while both were patients in a psychiatric hospital. Kelly was close to her mother, who died at 31 from head injuries that were never fully explained. That was the year Kelly got drunk for the first time. She was 9.

Roger's upbringing was nothing out of the ordinary. His father drove buses and taxis and sometimes worked two and three jobs, while his mother was mostly at home. When he was 13, Roger took his first drink-to be different from his friends. He remembers sneaking the bottle out of a cabinet and deliberately drinking himself incoherent. Soon, he was part of the hangout at the forest preserve.

They had a lot of fun together. Roger was laid-back, Kelly feisty. Drinking was the most reliable ritual of their married lives.

This is what Roger says, his simple mantra: "We messed up."

By the time their first child was born in 1985, the Mahnkes had moved to the suburbs. A repair job had taken Roger to Schaumburg, and he found himself driving around, liking how it felt. Children bicycled freely. Playgrounds were close.

"Financially, it was a real jump for us," Roger said of the two-bedroom townhouse they bought in a modest subdivision. It also meant a change in lifestyle, the move isolating them somewhat. Kelly does not drive; life in the car-dependent suburb isolated her, too.

Roger liked being the one to earn the money, and Kelly, though not exactly the domestic type, enjoyed the freedom of staying home. The first two children were born 17 months apart; the third in 1992.

Eventually, though, they found themselves living in a world that felt as if it had been tailored to somebody else's measurements. It didn't always fit.

Life changed insidiously. Roger fell into a habit of staying out to have a couple of drinks because he felt he deserved that after a day's work. Kelly began waking up to wine coolers, unhappy at home.

"At some point, we started to drift apart," said Kelly. "I'd be at home all day, angry because Roger wouldn't come home until late, and feeling like I should have gotten my high school diploma. Then I'd feel worse, because I knew I couldn't get a job anyhow because I drank all the time."

"We really didn't talk," Roger said.

The house was a barometer of what was happening.

When things were on an even keel between them, clothes made it to hangers and objects had a place of importance. There were periods when it was cleaned up enough to have a birthday party or to welcome family and friends.

But there were also darker swatches of time when the the blinds were always closed, the inside carefully hidden. Whole parts of 1994 were like that.

Debbie Pyers dialed 911 the morning the house was discovered. She is a mother of two, and had met Kelly almost 10 years earlier in a Lamaze class. They were instantly drawn to each other, their eyes meeting with mutual amusement as others obediently panted through imaginary pain.

"I was brought up so differently from Kelly," said Pyers, who lives in a more affluent part of the village. The two talk on the phone every day, sometimes two and three times.

"There would be times when she would tell me something and I'd try to understand it. Their family structure was different," said Pyers. "My kids went to bed at 8:30, and it would be late, after 10:30, and we'd be on the phone talking and I'd say, 'Aren't you going to put them to bed?' "

Pyers knew Roger and Kelly drank. The friendship was clearly defined by things they couldn't do, like go out as couples to the movies because theaters didn't serve beer. But Pyers had never seen either out of control. She also noticed their children seemed cared for and happy. She was not a judgmental friend.

What she also knew was that Kelly wasn't just drinking. She was also using alcohol to dull the terror of panic attacks she battled as an adult.

"It got to the point where I was afraid to go to sleep, because I was afraid to wake up, because I would get an attack," said Kelly. "I'd drink to deal with it. I know now that alcohol probably made (the attacks) worse."

Going back about six years, Pyers can recall Kelly's talking about how the house was a mess and Roger's complaining because she wouldn't clean. But Kelly was skillful keeping her at arm's length when necessary, confining their friendship to the phone for sometimes months at a time.

"One day," Pyers remembered, "I was driving and I had to go to the bathroom real bad. I was not far from Kelly's house, so I called her from the car. But she would not let me come by. She said it was just really, really a mess, and I said, 'Well, Kelly, how bad can it be?' "

It was like this:

There were flies. Dead ones. Live ones. A Polaroid tacked to the wall was so thickly covered with flyspecks the image was marred.

The inside of the refrigerator was splotched with mold, the shelves stocked with rotting food.

It had been a long time since anyone cooked a meal.

The kitchen sink was useless, without knobs or a faucet. The oven door was broken, the stove a greasy shelf where unwashed pots and bowls had come to rest. A man's suit jacket dangled from a hanger at one end of the counter. When the eggs were gone, the empty carton didn't make it to the garbage. Nothing did.

Just about every dish the family owned was dirty and lying out, not always in the kitchen. Utensils were washed on an as-needed basis, except at some point, that stopped, too. Food, then, was eaten with plastic and served on paper plates that became encrusted reminders of where meals took place. One plate was on the stairway. Another rested on the bare mattress where the whole family slept.

The family lost track of seven telephones under something. They bought clothing or appliances to replace what disappeared.

In the upstairs bathroom, plastic boxes crammed the toilet and beer cans swam in the sink.

Walking required careful detours around and over things like overturned chairs and broken fans. Underfoot, the terrain was sometimes soggy and the accompanying sound was a crunching of things being compacted or the clanging together of bottles of Zima, wine coolers and cans of Miller Lite.

The floor was not always visible, buried by piles of things that normally would have been dropped into a hamper or folded up in a drawer.

Or dumped in a bag and set outside for the garbage truck. The house smelled from a mlange of cigarette smoke, soiled clothing, decaying left-overs still in the foam carton from the drive-through window, spilled beer and human waste. The only working toilet was the one in the room behind the kitchen. But it was not stocked with toilet paper. Feces had been wiped across two walls and no one bothered to scrub it off.

This is what authorities found.

Family life went on a crash dive about 18 weeks before that, just after Christmas. But the mess had been accumulating for months. Roger and Kelly had been sliding for a year, and now they were scared-mostly about what they had become.

Roger found himself not calling home and staying out later to avoid what was waiting. It bothered him to do this, but he did it anyway. Sometimes he ignored his beeper even when he knew it was Kelly. Each time that happened, she got mad all over about the time she beeped to let him know their youngest had said "Da-da" for the first time. Roger, out drinking, did not bother to call.

When Roger finally got home at night, Kelly would sometimes stay just long enough for a good argument before taking her turn at the bars. As often as not, Roger would drink more at home, watching TV and smoking, eventually passing out in his chair.

Kelly was sick. A doctor diagnosed a problem with her liver and politely suggested she was allergic to alcohol. But even as she watched her face puff up, her skin turn pasty and her body grow lethargic, she drank.

"At first, I thought it was just a depression, but then it became physical," said Kelly. "I lost a lot of weight. At one point, I couldn't get out of bed and threw up if I did. I had Brendan on a schedule so he'd sleep until afternoon, and I remember lying there watching reruns, holding his hand as it stuck through the slats of the crib beside the bed. I couldn't remember things, not even someone's name from the TV. My hands got numb."

As the holidays approached, Roger gave the family an ultimatum: He said he would not buy a Christmas tree unless everyone helped clean.

"I wanted the kids to help me," said Roger. "I'd say, 'Come on, guys. If we just get going here, we'll get it cleaned.' But they weren't used to picking up."

Nobody helped, so Roger relented. He didn't want to rob the children of a holiday and thought a good one might do everyone some good. So he cleaned alone, as best he could, and family snapshots tell the story of a happy, bountiful Christmas. But it was one that sent the family on a quick spiral down.

"We managed to get the tree and the wrapping paper out of the house, but that's about where it stopped," Kelly said. "We were getting madder and madder at each other. Some of our arguments were just like this: 'You clean it up.' 'No, you clean up.' 'No! You clean it up.' "

After Christmas, neither did.

Life, then, adjusted to the shrinking contours defined by warring parents in a house filling up with garbage. Ultimately, there were no clear spots even for children to play. It was a confusing time in particular for Meghan, and Matt. Every morning, they left for a tidy suburban school with orderly classrooms, but came home to a world where they walked on trash and had to reach down into piles for pieces of clothing or shoes. Most evenings, when the yelling started, they were ordered upstairs and along with their younger brother, they'd huddle on top of the bare mattress to watch TV.

"I was kind of sad," Meghan remembered. "I could not have friends over. They were always kind of suspicious because I didn't have sleepovers, and they were always like, 'Well, why can't we come to your house?' I would say, 'Because my mom and dad don't like me to have friends over,' but I was thinking, 'I hope they don't find out.' "

Family life was a free-for-all. No bedtimes. No chores. No rules except for the one about opening the front door to visitors. If the family chose to answer, it would be "just a minute," then someone would sneak out the patio door and walk around.

"We really didn't deal with things like homework," said Kelly. "I do remember them asking for help and it depended on my mood whether I would help them or not."

For their 13th wedding anniversary, in February 1995, the Mahnkes renewed their vows with the church wedding they had never had, and hosted a small reception in a private hall. Kelly addressed formal invitations sitting near a pedestal ashtray spilling over with days' worth of Roger's cigarette butts. Their theme was "Dreams Do Come True."

"It did renew us to some degree," said Roger. After the festivities, they drove to Joliet and spent the weekend on a gambling boat, where they sat in a whirlpool and drank in the room.

"It was like coming out of a dream," said Kelly of coming home. "Everything just went back to the way it was."

Worse, actually. The whole affair cost them close to $3,000, and they hadn't yet paid for Christmas.

There was a comical aspect to some of their drunken bouts. Roger would come home late and stomp heavily in his big work shoes, kicking things in all directions. He'd smoke in silence, calculating where he figured Kelly would walk next and that's where he'd toss his beer cans.

Kelly, who had been flinging hers all day, simply changed targets. Once she got so angry she hurled a can at Roger, spraying beer everywhere. She missed, however, and broke the blinds. Roger did nothing, which he knew would infuriate her. He just said "great!"

Savagely, in their lowest moments, they betrayed and turned on each other. They fought, sometimes leaving red marks and bruises. Roger remembers twisting Kelly's arm hard, trying to keep her from going out without him. Kelly remembers attacking Roger in full view of the neighbors when he got home late.

The night everything fell apart, they decided, as they did sometimes, to go out together and leave Meghan at home and in charge of her two brothers with Roger's beeper number programmed into the phone.

They spent a couple of hours at a neighborhood bar, but the night ended quickly when Roger accused her of flirting. They yelled all the way home.

"I remember telling Kelly something like 'That's it. I'm out of here,' like I was going to leave her," said Roger. He stumbled upstairs, but Kelly grabbed a bottle of pills prescribed for a female problem and dumped six into her palm.

"I just tried to kill myself," she told Pyers, hysterical on the phone.

This had happened once before, a year earlier, but Pyers did not call police that time, then second-guessed herself through a sleepless night.

"She does this when she gets real upset," Pyers said of Kelly's pill-swallowing. "I don't know if it's a cry for help or if she's trying to punish the one who upset her or punish herself."

Whatever it was, Meghan was at her mother's side through much of it.

"I didn't want her to die," Meghan said.

The last thing Roger remembered was passing out on the mattress.

"Next thing I knew, there were six people standing around the bed, all in uniform. It was just like a scene out of 'Cops.' "

As he sat in an interview room at the police station, his mind cob-webbed and his face unshaven, he could hear police officers talking about him. "I'd like to kill that son-of-a-bitch," one said.

Police had taken protective custody of the children. Kelly was admitted to a hospital psychiatric ward and both she and Roger were named on misdemeanor charges of child endangerment and neglect.

He needed $100 to make bail.

"Roger looked like someone who just had the life kicked out of him," said Pyers, who drove to the police station with the money, then drove Roger home.

In the few hours he was gone, the village had found the home unfit for humans and police roped the front entry off with yellow tape that said "Crime Scene Do Not Enter." Roger ripped down the tape, then wrestled with the front door, which had been taken off the hinges and heaved by the walkway. Then he just sat down.

"I must have sat in the same spot for hours," Roger remembered. "I was stunned. Humiliated. I had lost everything. I had the phone down there with me, I had to call my mom, my work.

"Then I turned on the television and all of a sudden, it was showing exactly the spot where I was sitting. Our living room was all over the 4:30 news. I remember thinking, 'Oh, my God! The whole world can see me!' And to have the whole world see you at your most devastating moment, well, that's when I looked around that room, really for the first time, and asked myself, 'How did you let it get like this?' "

What Mary Passaglia remembered first was that she couldn't just walk in: She had to take a big step up. Passaglia, the village's environmental health supervisor, had been called out to inspect houses filled with trash, but never anything like the Mahnke house.

"It was just so unbelievable that a family could have lived in that environment. Walking through that house, I was trying to figure out where life would take place. I was able to touch the master bedroom ceiling because the piles reached the top of the mattress, and I am 5-foot-5."

She wrote this in a report:

"The odors were strong. Their sources included human feces and a variety of decaying food waste. I also found gross amounts of both live and dead flies, in addition to large amounts of fly fecal matter on the walls, ceiling, counter tops."

Passaglia also found that she liked Roger. The more she talked with him, the more she felt he was a genuinely nice man who loved his family. She was struck by a feeling that under the same set of circumstances, another man's instinct might be to bolt.

"I figured something just tragic had happened in this family," said Passaglia. "I wanted them to get their lives together and live a normal life."

Roger did not ask anyone for help.

But help arrived anyway. A nephew. Debbie Pyers. His half-brother. The wife of a guy at work. Kelly's father. As soon as Roger had cleared paths, he allowed his mother inside.

"When he opened the door, I noticed my hand had gone over my heart and I was saying, 'My God. My God. My God,' " recalled Ruth Mahnke. "I remember I turned to him and I said, 'I would have helped you.' And he said, 'Mom, it just started to get so bad and I was ashamed.' "

Roger's boss gave him vacation time for the cleanup, a job that required two 20-foot industrial-sized dumpsters and scores of black garbage bags.

"The cleaning was kind of creepy," said Pyers. "It was like a hush-hush organization was doing it. We kept the blinds shut and stayed inside. I was really mad about the way those children had been living. But I loved Kelly. I loved Roger. I did not walk away."

The phone rang with crank calls and hang-ups. Passing cars slowed; the people gawked. One night, an eager gossip befriended Roger and his mother as they walked, unaware of who they were.

"Didja hear about that family that lives around here?" the young boy asked anxiously. "They all pooped in a bucket and wiped it on the walls!" Roger's mother was speechless. "You know," Roger said evenly, "I'll just bet it wasn't that bad."

The school called, and Roger stopped by to pick up envelopes for Meghan and Matt. Classmates at Collins Elementary sent notes:

Dear Matt: You are very nice to everyone. Your desk has been very clean and you have been getting good grades. I feel sorry for you and your family. You didn't do anything wrong.

Dear Meghan: We hope you come back to school.. We understand that you think we will tease you, but we won't.

New kitchen tile was donated by a father at the grade school. A resident called the village to arrange to give the family a sofa. A relative bought sacks of building materials but refused Roger's money. Fresh new coatings of donated paint slathered the walls.

After hurling yet another bag into the dumpster one day, Roger walked to the townhomes' common mailbox and found himself standing next to a neighbor he did not know. She smiled, studying his face and extended a friendly hand.

"Are you sure you want to touch 'the squalor guy'?" Roger asked in all seriousness.

She hugged him. And Roger cried.

The first lawyer Roger and Kelly talked to suggested they refinance their house to pay for his services.

The second one looked at them squarely and said: "I don't know if I want you." Mike Ruzicka was unnerving. He was big and when he talked, which he did a lot, his voice sounded as though it could move furniture. Mostly, though, he seemed to understand where they had been and where they wanted to go.

They hired him. They wanted their kids.

Ruzicka, who specializes in juvenile matters, was once a part of the state's child welfare agency, the Department of Children and Family Services. Originally, he was an investigator on the front lines, recommending if children should be removed from a home.

"You run into a lot of dirty houses," said Ruzicka, who remembers one in particular that was so far gone he walked in, ran out, and vomited at the doorstep. Typically he would find substance abuse, alcohol, low intelligence or mental illness-underlying problems that tended to explain, not excuse.

By the time Ruzicka got involved, Roger and Kelly had chosen to accept full responsibility. They pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of child neglect and endangerment in a separate Circuit Court proceeding. Their punishment: a suspended six-month jail term and probation for 18 months. The day after, their doorbell rang and a deliveryman handed them a large bouquet of flowers, sent by a stranger. "I decided to be one of the people to encourage you," the card read.

Already, they had come a long way.

After Kelly spent six days in psychiatric care she came home on anti-depressants. After a month of intensive out-patient therapy, she was handed her marble, a symbolic gift to remind her that if she took a drink, she could lose hers all over again.

Roger and Kelly worked with a certain resolve about doing what was necessary to mend their lives. Roger was able to adjust his work schedule so he could drive them to individual and group therapy sessions as well as parenting classes and family counseling. They also attended frequent meetings to follow a 12-step program to live without alcohol.

The night before his first Juvenile Court appearance on their behalf, Ruzicka visited the house to get to know Roger and Kelly better. They asked him to help remove an overhead light so they could wipe out the bugs.

"I guess I was kind of surprised the way the house looked-new floor, new carpet, the kitchen pretty much spotless," said Ruzicka. "The kids' rooms were looking good. It hit me that these people had taken a look at the problem and recognized what the problem was: them."

Ruzicka's goal was to reunite the family as quickly as possible.

The system, however, moved with deliberate caution. The children were not returned for 41Z2 months.

The Mahnkes were among 77,082 reports of neglect or abuse investigated by DCFS in fiscal 1995. Theirs was among the 40 percent found to be credible complaints. And their situation, no matter what its particulars, would be ultimately evaluated alongside some stark examples of how the state had failed to protect kids.

Having the state take custody of the Mahnke children ran counter to the judgment of Richard Zemon, a veteran DCFS investigator of 101Z2 years. To this day, Zemon believes the state overreacted in assuming custody and did so for the wrong reasons, putting fear of bad publicity ahead of other concerns.

Zemon began assembling facts. There was no history of contact with the police, but the family had come to DCFS attention four years earlier when a neighbor complained the children had been left home alone. Zemon noted that DCFS did not intervene.

Interviewing first Roger, then the children and Kelly, he came away with a picture of a caring, though colossally dysfunctional, family. From Roger, for example, he learned that even at their worst, he and Kelly did a load of wash most nights so the children would have clean clothes.

Of particular significance was his conversation with Joel Karr, a school social worker, who told him that generally Meghan and Matt came to school clean and did not stand out except there had been a recent concern that Matt was disheveled. Karr said he talked with the Mahnkes and Kelly reacted badly when he suggested that Matt might be "neglected." But the boy's appearance immediately improved.

"All this told me something," said Zemon, "that these were not bad people, but that they let a situation get out of control. To me, unless there is an urgent risk, try to work out something without taking the kids. In removing kids, you traumatize someone. Custody is necessary when there's a real risk and when you don't have a responsible relative to help out."

Zemon drew up a plan that a copy of his official log shows was agreed to by his supervisor. He would not take formal custody, but would instead go to court for a protective order that would ensure Roger's and Kelly's cooperation while the children lived with Kelly's cousin, a Chicago police officer, who volunteered to keep them while Roger and Kelly put their lives back on track. At any point, DCFS could go to court for custody if the Mahnkes did not comply.

However, Zemon's log notes that three hours later he got a call from a higher-up saying the media wanted details. He said he was told to scrap his plan and put the children back under protective custody. He was overruled.

"I had never had a phone call like that," said Zemon. "I was furious. I was flat-out old that because the press was asking questions, the department's position would have to be to take custody of these kids.

"I think we hung this family out to dry," said Zemon, who retired three months later from DCFS.

But DCFS noted there isn't always agreement about what is the right thing to do when protecting the best interests of children, and pointed to a history replete with examples of why caution was the most appropriate route.

DCFS was already under a blistering attack from many directions for being too overburdened to effectively safeguard children. The Mahnke case triggered the memory of the house on Keystone Avenue in Chicago where police went on a drug raid in February of 1994 and discovered 19 children living amid rat droppings and garbage, most of their mothers on welfare, some on drugs.

There also was the haunting memory of 3-year-old Joseph Wallace. Though DCFS intervened, his mother, a woman with a history of mental problems, won her custody dispute, then in 1993, she hanged her son. This was a red flag in view of Kelly's emotional history. In the midst of the case, a psychologist suggested she be evaluated as manic-depressive. Kelly already noticed she was doing peculiar things, such as waking up at 3 a.m. to scrub the toilet bowl. It was determined, however, that her medication created these symptoms, which disappeared when her prescription changed.

Meghan, Matt and Brendan spent five of their first days in state custody as patients in a hospital, where they were evaluated by therapists and social workers. Then they were placed in the Chicago home of Kelly's father, James Scriven, and his wife, Carol, who themselves were parenting two young children. Scriven said it was difficult to care for three more, but felt it was his responsibility as the grandfather.

About two months into the placement, Ruzicka filed court papers alleging that the antagonistic relationship between Kelly and her father was having a negative effect on the children. Ruzicka said he had seen the children show up dirty at the DCFS office for a visit. He also alleged the Scrivens allowed the children to be baby-sat by Carol's son, who she acknowledged was an ex-convict who served time on a weapons charge. Carol Scriven said he was sometimes in the house, but denied that the Mahnke children were ever left in his care.

During the placement, the Scrivens' household, too, would come under the scrutiny of DCFS. Carol Scriven blamed Kelly for this and said it included an incident that happened while the Mahnke children were there, when Carol disciplined one of her boys for using foul language by rubbing hot pepper on his lips.

At various points, professionals who evaluated the Mahnke children found them to be wrestling with the kind of emotional problems one might expect from living in a house filled with garbage and with parents who made sure they had food and clean clothes yet left them to fend largely for themselves. All the children, Meghan in particular, were also described as having problems stemming from the separation from their parents.

"This case did not belong in Juvenile Court," said Ruzicka, who took his own kids to the Mahnke house one day and cooked steak fajitas for everyone. "Everyone panicked. Court holds a bat over your head, but these people reacted when they were slapped. Yes, they were drunks. Yes, the house was a pigsty. Yes, the kids lived like animals. But look at what they've done."

Roger and Kelly used their time without the children to learn how to walk without "crutches." They got to know each other, this time sober. They weren't exactly sure if they'd like each other, but they were pleasantly surprised. They went out to dinner. Went to movies. Joined a sober bowling league. To their relief, they discovered they shared the same wicked wit as when they drank.

When the new oven arrived, the deliveryman kept peering over for a good look at the living room. He recognized the outside of the house from television, and they all talked about how bad the garbage must have been.

"You'd never know this was the same place," he said, thinking they were new owners who rehabbed. "You guys really did a great job. Those people, man, what was their name?"

Kelly and Roger looked at one another sidelong, answering together:

"Us!"

t has been a year now, since Meghan, Matt and Brendan were allowed to return to their parents.

The Mahnkes live as a family, two adults and now four children. Connor, the youngest, was born in July. They share the house with a parakeet, a mouse, a rabbit, a large tortoise and three hamsters.

There are rules.

No shoes on the carpet. No food anywhere except the kitchen. No playing outside until rooms are clean, and that means everything picked up off the floor.

No alcohol. Neither Roger nor Kelly has taken a drink since the moment they lost everything. They are sober, now, for a year and four months. And no excuses. Though Roger and Kelly debate endlessly about whether alcoholism is something the will can conquer or if it is a disease that can fell even the strongest of people, this is their explanation:

"We were wrong. It's that simple," said Roger.

"We blame ourselves," Kelly said.

Today, the Mahnkes raise their children in a house that is almost obsessive in its cleanliness.

"We both get kind of edgy when anything is out of place," said Kelly. "I'm starting to sound like my grandmother, and that scares me. The kids were eating popcorn in the kitchen the other day and I was telling them not to make a mess on 'my floor.' "

The home has been painstakingly reassembled with things of particular meaning, such as a crucifix in the living room and a kitchen plaque that says, "Home Sweet Home." Family snapshots are displayed on a sideboard and Kelly, like a museum curator, divides them into three distinct periods of Mahnke history: "Before it got bad"; "When the kids were gone"; "After we got the kids back."

Upstairs, the two bedrooms were reinvented, much to the delight of the children. Meghan has one. Matt shares the other with Brendan. Kelly and Roger sleep on the fold-out couch in the living room with Connor in a portable crib alongside. Kelly looks at him, thankful that she had the presence of mind to drink less when she was pregnant with the other three.

The house is close quarters. When Kelly was overdue with the baby, she sent the children to their rooms to play more often than usual, admitting she needed space. One day, she grabbed the phone and dialed Pyers to conspire about how she might convince the doctor to help the baby along.

"OK," said Kelly, thinking a moment. "Then how about if I tell him I don't feel like cleaning my house?"

This kind of humor has endured through misery. It's survival instinct, Roger thinks. When he spotted his van in the parking lot after a family shopping trip recently, his favorite sentence from a newspaper story chronicling the cleanup popped into his head.

"And the maroon van sagged with the weight of garbage bags," Roger announced, voice booming. It is a family joke and Meghan and Matt giggle even though they've heard it many times.

They still get embarrassed when they go to the grocery store or order a pizza and wonder if someone recognizes them or their address. Some neighbors still look at them funny. One in particular has a habit of peering around her grill to check on their activities. When the telephone rings, no one answers before first checking the number displayed on Caller ID.

Theirs was a costly mess.

"We're completely wiped," Roger says. He estimates close to $20,000 was spent on two lawyers, counseling, building materials and all of the possessions to start over. Roger's mother gave them money and the Mahnkes cashed about $12,000 in savings bonds, some of which had not yet matured. An insurance policy had to be cashed in, too.

One night recently, Roger and Kelly were sitting with Brendan at the kitchen table when he looked up and asked: "When you went away, why didn't you take me with you?"

"He thought we abandoned him," Kelly said. They explained as best they could in language a 4-year-old could understand, just as they have talked openly with both Matt, now 10, and Meghan, almost 12, about how, if alcoholism can truly be inherited, they, too, could be at risk.

The family tends to cling to one another. They pile on top of each other on the sofa. Hold hands when they walk. Roger, now 38, and Kelly, 32, like to say they live one day at a time, never claiming to be "cured" of anything but stronger because of what they have learned. The children go with them to family counseling. They find themselves watching Matt and Meghan, wondering how they have digested things they do not always talk about.

"At dinner the other night, I set out a bottle of sparkling grape juice," said Roger. "Matt's eyes went straight to the label and he started reading it. I told him there was no alcohol, but it got me to wondering if he trusts us. I hope he does."

For Sweetest Day, Roger went out shopping and came home with a symbolic gift that made Kelly laugh out loud when he offered it: a ceramic figurine of two happy, hugging pigs. Meghan studied it thoughtfully and then disappeared upstairs to her room.

When she came back down, she was holding a miniature bottle from her Barbie doll collection and placed it carefully between the two pigs.

"I didn't really know drinking was bad at the time," said Meghan, a slight girl who used to lie awake sometimes until after 2 in the morning, her stomach churning to the sound of angry voices. "My parents are different now. They are always working hard to make things right.

"I just think we're really lucky," said Meghan. "We're so happy now. It's like that was somebody else's house."

---This concludes BEHIND CLOSED DOORS; A SCHAUMBURG FAMILY REBUILDS AFTER A SHATTERING DESCENT INTO CHAOS by Bonita Brodt, published September 15, 1996

Posted at 08:34:30 AM

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---Funny quote, not sure the author: America is the only place in the world where people keep $30,000 cars in the driveway so they can store $30 worth of junk in the garage.

Incredible story there. Since it was written so long ago, I wonder how the family is doing today. The kids mentioned in the story would be 24, 22, and 17 by now, and the "new baby" would be almost 14 years old!

ZORN REPLY -- No. My completely uninformed gut reaction is that creditors have a point when they ask whether these bonuses are really necessary to keep the executive talent from leaving the company and, so, therefore, to keep the company strong and on the road to recovery.

I work with many OCD students, and this type of behavior is really not reflective of the disorder. Rather, I see it more as an anxiety issue, the deep compulsion to never throw anything away, is more of a mental health problem. I wonder, instead of trying to rearrange these peoples' lives and/or possessions, which can be extremely damaging to the hoarder, one instead sought treatment and medication for the underlying anxiety problem of letting go. Then, perhaps, they could be helped.

Wendy C, hoarding is a difficult condition to treat. The hoarder has to want to change his/her behavior, and many simply don't. There's more to it than just anxiety.

As to the label, here's what the Mayo Clinic site says:
"Hoarding, also called compulsive hoarding and compulsive hoarding syndrome, can be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But many people who hoard don't have other OCD-related symptoms, and researchers are working to better understand hoarding as a distinct mental health problem."
-- http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/hoarding/ds00966

Hoarding is an obsession, but not the type of obsessive behavior usually exhibited by my OCD students, whom are more often concerned with ritualistic behavior, order, arrangement of things, cleanliness, not the collection of materials resulting in a chaotic mess. I'm sure there are cases of hoarding with some OCD individuals, however I personally wouldn't count it as a symptom of OCD behavior.

There are different flavors of OCD, Wendy. I was a personal assistant to a hoarder for a brief time, and his hoarding was obsessive in nature. Have you ever met a hoarder personally? The students you help are probably more functional.

---I think there are different schools of thought on whether hoarding is a symptom of OCD, which broadly covers many behaviors, or a separate disorder which can show up in other disabilities, or in individuals without a history of any mental health/behavior issues. As I said, I personally believe this is a separate disorder. I don't exclude those with OCD, I just don't think it compares to many of the symptoms OCD people exhibit. Just my opinion.

OCD appears to becoming a broad term that includes some forms of behavior as Wendy pointed out, which we wouild not think of as traditional OCD. I have seen Alcoholism and Eating disorders described in some literature as being OCD. I am not sure if that is true. Both couples exhibit obessive compulsive behavior lthough the second couple seemed to have been trapped in a cycle of alchololism, depression and shame. Regardless of how one classifies these conditions, they are difficult to treat, they are difficult for family and friends to understand and they create chaos. Anti-depressants help but finding the correct one and proper dosage can put one on a merry-go-round of medication hell. Relapse is a hallmark of most these disorders . My prayers are not just with anyone who suffers from OCD but also for their loved ones.

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